Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Great, an Evangelical promotes having kids

A couple of months ago, I posted about being invited to an informal gathering of Christian couples to let them know about 40 Days for Life here in Halifax. And I was puzzled and dismayed to learn that those seven couples only had three children in total.

Just this week, I have been emailing back and forth with a Pentecostal pastor who became a Catholic last Easter Saturday about this very thing. He told me that he was concerned about the non-Catholic churches' lack of teaching on marriage-divorce- and remarriage. I told him I was concerned that they never spoke about contraception, because I thought the two topics were related.

His return email told me that he had never even considered the subject, as it wasn't an issue in the Pentecostal church. So I sent him the link to Humanae Vitae, the famous encyclical by Pope Paul VI defending the Church's teaching against artificial contraception. And I also directed him to the website of Dr. Janet Smith, who has done some very good teaching on this subject.

So I was very pleased to find that Erin had blogged about having children. She has previously written about being open to the number of children God wants you to have in your family. Now she tackles one of the excuses that people give for not having kids, or for delaying them - a perceived lack of resources.

A good post. And I am glad to see that my evangelical brothers and sisters are beginning to think about this subject more. Prior to the Lambeth Conference in 1930, it was actually the Protestants who were more vocal about the ills of artificial contraception than the Catholics were. Few of them even know that this is the case; so when they find out, light bulbs go off.

Perhaps this will be another common ground for us Catholics and non-Catholics in the not-so-distant future.